Recommendation 21

Despite our earlier concerns, the National Audit Office found that the programme costs still may not capture the full costs of reforming the courts and tribunals. This is partly because when reporting the costs of the programme, HMCTS does not include all of the costs associated with its 2021 business case. For example, of the Crown Prosecution Service will fund its own costs to develop interfaces with common platform. As a result, these costs will not show on reform programme expenditure, even though the original budget was expected to cover the full costs of a shared platform.41 We asked HMCTS whether it thought it was important to keep an eye on the costs to the criminal justice system as a whole as there was still a cost to the taxpayer, even if it was not one it was paying for. HMCTS responded that it thought that this was a fair point for it to look at this.42